When you first meet someone, it’s extremely rare for them to tell you their name and nothing else. You’re invariably going to be involved in a conversation about where you’re from, what you do for work, hobbies, what they arrested you for, that sort of thing. Social etiquette insists we exchange pleasantries on first meeting (even if we’re not really interested), but every pleasantry we engage in with a person increases the odds of the person’s name being pushed out of short-term memory before we can encode it.
